WASHINGTON (AP) — A former Internal Revenue Service contractor who pleaded guilty to leaking tax information to news organizations about former President Donald Trump and thousands of the country's wealthiest people was sentenced Monday to five years in prison.
Charles Edward Littlejohn, 38, of Washington, D.C., pleaded guilty to fraudulent disclosure of tax returns and tax return information for providing tax information to two news organizations, The New York Times and ProPublica, between 2018 and 2020.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said she imposed the maximum sentence possible to deter anyone else from feeling “obliged to break the law.”
Littlejohn apologized to those affected and said he was prepared to face the consequences. “I acted in good faith, even if I was wrong, to serve the public interest,” he said. “But my actions undermined the fragile trust we have in our government.”
His lawyer, Lisa Manning, argued for a lighter sentence in line with general guidelines for someone with no criminal record, but Reyes said the crime was unusual because Littlejohn targeted the president.
“Targeting the sitting president of the United States is targeting the office of the presidency,” she said. “Attacking an elected official should not go unchecked.”
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She also sentenced Littlejohn to three years' probation and fined him $5,000.
Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida said he was among those whose tax information was leaked by Littlejohn. Scott said the potential release of the information affected his entire family and that Littlejohn should have faced additional criminal charges from the Department of Justice for leaking personal information “just to cause harm to people.”
Justice Department prosecutors did not name the news organizations in their complaint, but the content and timing of the complaint are consistent with a New York Times story about Trump's tax returns and a report by the nonprofit investigative journalism group ProPublica about the tax payments of wealthy Americans.
Trump, who broke with tradition and refused to voluntarily release his tax returns, paid $750 in federal income tax the year he entered the White House and some years paid no tax at all thanks to huge losses, according to a 2020 New York Times report. Six years of Trump's tax returns were later released by the then-Democrat-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.
Meanwhile, ProPublica reported in 2021 on a trove of tax return data on the wealthiest Americans, which found that the 25 richest people legally pay a smaller percentage of their income in tax than most ordinary workers.
The papers declined to comment on the allegations, and a ProPublica reporter previously said he did not know who the source was. The report sparked calls for tax reform for the wealthy and also prompted calls for an investigation into the leaking of certain legally protected tax information.
The IRS has said any disclosure of taxpayer information is unacceptable, and the agency has since stepped up security.
